Input types

run! usually takes two inputs: a ModelList and data for the meteorology. The data for the meteorology is usually provided for one time step using an Atmosphere, or for several time-steps using a TimeStepTable{Atmosphere}. The ModelList can also be provided as a singleton, or as a vector or dictionary of.

run! knows how to handle these data formats via the PlantSimEngine.DataFormat trait (see this blog post to learn more about traits). For example, we tell PlantSimEngine that a TimeStepTable should be handled like a table by implementing the following trait:

DataFormat(::Type{<:PlantMeteo.TimeStepTable}) = TableAlike()

If you need to use a different data format for the meteorology, you can implement a new trait for it. For example, if you have a table-alike data format, you can implement the trait like this:

DataFormat(::Type{<:MyTableFormat}) = TableAlike()

There are two other traits available: SingletonAlike for a data format representing one time-step only, and TreeAlike for trees, which is used for MultiScaleTreeGraphs nodes (not generic at this time).

Special considerations for new input types

If you want to use a custom data format for the inputs, you need to make sure some methods are implemented for your data format depending on your use-cases.

For example if you use models that need to get data from a different time step (e.g. a model that needs to get the previous day's temperature), you need to make sure that the data from the other time-steps can be accessed from the current time-step.

To do so, you need to implement the following methods for your structure that defines your rows:

• Base.parent: return the parent table of the row, e.g. the full DataFrame
• PlantMeteo.rownumber: return the row number of the row in the parent table, e.g. the row number in the DataFrame
• (Optionnally) PlantMeteo.row_from_parent(row, i): return row i from the parent table, e.g. the row i from the DataFrame. This is only needed if you want high performance, the default implementation calls Tables.rows(parent(row))[i].